Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Mother who kills daughter has false compassion

An article written by Sandra Laville and published in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia is wrongly presenting the actions of a mother in the UK who killed her suicidal daughter as that of a "devoted mother."

The article states

A "devoted mother" who found her desperately ill daughter trying to kill herself spent 28 hours administering a cocktail of lethal drugs to her after failing to convince her to go on living, a court has heard.

Kay Gilderdale, 55, helped her daughter Lynn, 31, end the pain of an "unimaginably wretched" form of myalgic encephalopathy. She handed her daughter syringes of morphine to administer to herself and when that failed, gave her antidepressants and sleeping pills, injected morphine into her intravenous line and tried to cause a fatal clot on the lung, Lewes Crown Court, south of London, was told.

At one point early the next day, when she saw her daughter was still breathing, Mrs Gilderdale rang an assisted dying charity for advice. Shortly afterwards Lynn Gilderdale, died - 30 hours after she had called her mother to her bedside in the midst of a suicide attempt, pleading: "I want the pain to go. I don't want to go on."

The jury heard that Mrs Gilderdale, a "loving, caring" mother supported "unconditionally" by her family, admitted assisting her daughter's suicide in December 2008.

It is interesting to note that when Lynn Gilderdale didn't die that her mother, Kay, called an assisted dying group (euthanasia lobby) and soon after the daughter died. What kind of advice do these groups actually provide?

The article then asks whether or not the charge should be attempted murder or assisted suicide? The article states:

Sally Howes, QC, prosecuting, said the jury had to judge whether her actions amounted to attempted murder. "Instead of assisting, she then set about performing actions which were designed with one intention only, that of terminating her daughter's life. It was not done to make her better. It was done to make sure that she died."

The charge was attempted murder because nobody could be sure whether Mrs Gilderdale had administered the fatal dose or doses. She denies the charge.

It seems very clear that Kay Gilderdale, the mother, did not assist her daughter in commiting suicide but rather attempted to kill her. The mother went from being part of a suicide, to actually directly and intentionally causing the death of her daughter.